Zhang Tianshen died with Zhu Haifeng’s hands around his throat.

Shen Cong spent twenty minutes moving through the battlefield recovering bolts. The fang-tipped ones were priority — limited supply, significant time investment to make. He found all eight. The standard bolts were less recoverable; several had passed through targets and into the road surface or nearby rubble.

While he worked, the survivors of both factions dealt with the dead in the quiet way that people dealt with the dead when they’d seen enough of it that the procedural aspects were familiar.

Most of the Dragon Slayer casualties had died from bolts.

He was aware of the looks. Not direct — nobody was meeting his eyes directly — but the particular kind of peripheral awareness that came from people trying to assess something they’d witnessed without the subject noticing the assessment. He understood what they were processing. He’d killed more people tonight than anyone else present, at distances and with a precision that didn’t match anything in their prior experience of what evolved-person combat looked like.

He filed the effect as useful and kept collecting bolts.

Zhu Haifeng offered him the Activity cores from both Dragon Slayer mutants, along with the Dragon Slayers’ accumulated material stores.

The cores presented a specific discomfort he hadn’t fully anticipated.

Evolved-beast cores he’d harvested without hesitation since the first Burrower. These were different — not because the material was different, but because the organisms had been human. He held that consideration for approximately four seconds, weighed it against what he’d observed of Wang Dong and Zhang Tianshen’s conduct, and reached for the fang-knife.

Wang Dong’s shoulder spines came off first. Zhang Tianshen’s finger-claw cores second — all ten, severed at the base and packed.

He was aware of every person present watching him do it.

That was fine. That was, in fact, the point — not the cores themselves, which were tactically useful but not irreplaceable, but the message the act sent to every person present about where they stood relative to him. He was someone who harvested human Activity cores without visible hesitation. Whatever calculations people might be running about whether his equipment or vehicle or general position made him worth moving against, this scene was now part of that calculation.

“I’m taking the cores,” he said. “Keep the rest. I’m going to get the truck. We need to deal with Wu Wenjun before he can move.”

Zhu Haifeng’s mouth moved slightly. “Right. Yes.”

The walk back to Vajra was quiet.

Eventually Zhu Haifeng started talking. The 2016 Nanling County floods — trapped on high ground, waiting for rescue, and the army coming. His friend Chu Jian and a fire station rescue. The particular feeling of government exists, and it will come for you that made collective survival possible.

Then the apocalypse. The exit from the underground shelter. The expectation that the same social contract would hold. The discovery that it wouldn’t, because the anchor that held it had been removed.

“The people in disasters help each other because they know rescue is coming. They know someone bigger than themselves is going to show up and make it right. Take that away, and people become what they become.”

He’d found Zhang Tianshen’s conduct intolerable. He’d done something about it. He’d been doing something about it for two months, one engagement at a time, across three factions’ territories, with twelve people and two guns.

Shen Cong listened without commenting.

He didn’t share Zhu Haifeng’s belief that removing Zhang Tianshen would restore order. Order required ongoing maintenance by some authority that people accepted. Removing a specific predator created a vacancy; it didn’t create the replacement. But he could hold the distinction between thinking Zhu Haifeng’s model of social restoration was naive and thinking Zhu Haifeng was wrong to have done what he’d done. The Dragon Slayers’ conduct had been what it was. The women at Sanhe Village were there for specific reasons. Addressing those reasons wasn’t naive — it was necessary, regardless of what came after.

He respected the commitment. He didn’t share the theory.

When Zhu Haifeng reached out to put a hand on his shoulder, Shen Cong stepped sideways to maintain distance.

“Good work tonight,” he said, which was accurate and wasn’t the same as warmth.

He drove Vajra to Sanhe Village with Li Laotou’s team following on foot, Zhang Youhai included. Zhu Haifeng’s remaining functional people came along.

The Dragon Slayers’ main group had gone out tonight. What remained at the village was the support element — injured, non-combatant, and Wu Wenjun.

Zhu Haifeng and his people found Wu Wenjun inside one of the surviving structures, in conditions that explained why Zhang Youhai’s description of the Dragon Slayers’ conduct in the main district had been delivered with the particular flatness of someone keeping something at arm’s length.

The charges were stated in front of a gathered group of survivors — the people who’d been living at Sanhe Village under Dragon Slayer control, the women who’d been brought there, the men who’d been kept around as labor. Zhu Haifeng’s voice was steady while he listed them.

Wu Wenjun wasn’t able to stand.

Thunk.

One clean strike. Zhu Haifeng had been practicing his convictions for two months; the mechanics were efficient.

Chu Jian carried the evidence to where the assembled survivors could see it.

Shen Cong watched the shift in the crowd from the position he’d taken at the edge of the gathering — close enough for situational awareness, far enough to exit quickly if something went wrong. He watched the particular moment when the cumulative weight of months of specific treatment met the specific fact that the people responsible for it were gone.

The crowd made sounds.

He didn’t try to characterize what he saw on those faces. He noted it and moved on.

“Go get the diesel,” he said to Zhang Youhai, who had been gravitating toward the crowd as Zhu Haifeng announced the formation of the City South Survivors’ Mutual Aid and Rescue Team.

Zhang Youhai snapped back. “Right. Yes. On it.”

(End of Chapter 69)